Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Krishna Fluting, by John Berry. In this cleverly written comic novel, Quakers in India find that not all love is brotherly...
...Treatment Man, by William Wiegand. Part melodrama, part morality play, this novel of life in a maximum security prison is a sharply written exercise in federal penmanship...
...gasped Major General Lew Wallace. "Did I set all this in motion?" In 1899, the hard-riding, hard-writing Civil War commander was already appalled by the smashing success of his first historical novel, Ben-Hur, which in 19 years had sold 400,000 copies. And that, though the general did not live to see it, was only the beginning. By 1920, a stage version of the general's work had been running 21 years, had been seen by 20 million fans, had grossed $10 million. In 1926, M-G-M turned it into the first of the cinemammoths...
Whatever the inspiration that sent a flat-wheeled caboose clattering after Author Metalious' steam-powered first novel, Peyton Place, the sequel bears all the marks of a book whacked together on a long weekend. The original novel required readers interested only in literary privy-peeping to wear out their forefingers spelling through long passages devoted, with some success, to such matters as scene-setting and characterization. Return has little more scene-setting than a limerick, and the characterization is negligible. The meat of the book is as strong-flavored as bear steak-"Jennifer lay awake in the dark, smiling...
Jennifer, the flagellant with fluorescent molars, is a new character. But her leering mother-in-law, who crouches by a hot-air register listening to the merry whack of belt on flesh, is an old friend from the first novel. So is Heroine Allison Mac-Kenzie, the girl author who writes by day and wrongs by night. Like Author Metalious, she produces a bestseller about a meretricious little New England town, and is all but drummed out of it by indignant neighbors. Her fatherly old publisher comforts her in the best way he knows how, and he certainly knows...